Daniel Riccuito, main author of The Beauty of Terror, with Jennifer Matsui and myself, is incandescent with rage about changes Fangoria magazine made to the piece without consulting us. I’m slightly more philosophical, having been really horribly rewritten several times during my film and TV career. A shout-out here to the giftless bastards at Tern Television and to so-called director Crispin Whittier Whittell, whom I would like to shoot with a gun.

The people who butcher creative work are usually friendly, smiling people. They totally don’t get that they just mutilated something you cared about, and stole something that was rightfully yours. “Think of me as the kindly torturer,” Sid Sheinberg told Terry Gilliam while doing his best to rip the guts out of BRAZIL. These people look hurt when you tell them they destroyed something they didn’t understand. They look confused when you say you wish they’d asked. They made everything better without bothering us, so why aren’t we delighted? Of course, they only enjoy such freedom from doubt, such artistic carte blanche with other people’s labours because they are totally bereft of any creativity themselves.

Fangoria’s changes are tone-deaf, clumsy, anti-intellectual, humourless, and mostly unnecessary. But what makes them completely unacceptable is that they didn’t send a copy of the proposed alterations during the months the piece was waiting to see print. This kind of consultation ALWAYS happens. When I write for Electric Sheep, which is an online publication, the very thoughtful and precise editorial changes are always offered up to me to see if they’re acceptable. With Sight & Sound, or with Criterion liner notes, the same thing happens. Apart from being courteous, this is also efficient: if a writer has expressed themself unclearly, the editor’s attempt to fix the problem might not work — it may well take the writer’s input to clarify what the piece intended to say.

The GOOD NEWS is — you can read the original article at The Chiseler, here.

This is possibly of interest only to Daniel, Jennifer and myself, but I thought I’d run through the more egregious changes, just for the record.

A minor example: “Of course, the answer is partly grounded in Steele’s unique physical equipment” becomes “The answer is partly grounded in Steele’s unique physical attributes.” This is typical of the changes, where an interesting word choice is replaced with a mundane, hackneyed one.

A more complex one: “Steele’s beauty is no accident of nature, even if she is, but a virtuoso performance by an artist in full command of her talent summoning and banishing it in equal measure in her dual role as mortal damsel in distress and undead predator released from her crypt.” This becomes, in Fangoria’s blood-smeared hands, “Steele’s beauty is no accident of nature, even if she is, and Sunday showcases a virtuoso performance by an artist in full command of her talent, summoning and banishing it in equal measure in her dual role as mortal damsel in distress and undead predator released from her crypt.” Which is hard to understand, as it seems to say that Steele is summoning and banishing her talent, using it to play the damsel and abandoning it when she plays the revengeful revenant. This is not only not what we meant, it’s not even what Fangoria means to say.

We wrote, “Where Steele’s Italian films are concerned, we are watching silent movies of a sort.” This is following a reference to Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomon, making the argument that Steele’s appearance has something in common with his hand-tinted special effects. Clearly the reference was deemed too obscure for the magazine’s public (though encouraging people to go look something up never struck me as a disservice to the reader). Chopping the Chomon line, Fangoria makes do with, “Where the actress’ Italian films are concerned, the experience is like watching silent movies of a sort.” The “of a sort” becomes bizarre and ungainly since it’s the first mention of silent cinema, and it’s not even really clear what is meant by “the experience” — the experience of watching them, presumably, but if so, why not say so?

The phrase “molded by Italian cameramen into disquieting and sudden plasticity,” which referred to Steele’s entire Italian career, is folded into a sentence about BLACK SUNDAY and forced to serve as a description of that film, which had only one cinematographer, Mario Bava.

Here’s one of my own sentences: “While Italian movies robbed Steele of her voice, they liberated her from what it had meant in Britain.” This becomes “they liberated her from the constraints of Britain,” which is a different point, one less related to the beginning of the sentence, and the overall point explored in the next two paragraphs, which is about class.

My line “Omninational, omnisexual, but definitely carnivorous” just gets chopped altogether, leaving the section to widdle out lamely. That was my best sentence!

Even a quote from the star herself is not safe from the editors’ “creativity” — “There was a tremendous feeling of respect, whereas in my earliest roles at Rank I always felt shoved around, practically negated by the pressure of production.” “Negated” is replaced with “ignored.” As Matt Damon complains in THE INFORMANT! “How is that OK? That’s NOT OK.”

Or, there’s this: “amid the groundswells of fog, lifeless trees and gloomy dungeons, Steele is an absence impossibly concretized in penumbras and voids.” Fangoria couldn’t cope with such richness, apparently, so we get “amid the groundswells of fog, lifeless trees and gloomy dungeons, Steele is a walking shadow.” Pity the poor hack who, throwing out a complex phrase, must try to invent something of their own to replace it. I know, Shakespeare! That always works!

“Dark Barbara comes back as a very corporeal revenant, hair occluding one profile, like Phil Oakey of the Human League.” References to British new wave bands of the eighties are another thing Fangoria’s readership are not expected to be able to cope with, so the sentence is lopped. “Obscuring” is subbed in for the too high-brow “occluding,”

This, I thought, was one of my more useful paragraphs. “Almost indescribable in terms of plot, character or dialogue, the film looks stunning, as chiaroscuro as Steele’s coal-black hair and snow-white skin. Apparently the product of monkey-typewriter improvisation, the story serves as a kind of post-modern dream-jumble of every Gothic narrative ever. You might get a story like this if you showed all of Steele’s horrors to a pissed-up grade-schooler and then asked them to describe the film they just saw. As a result, the movie really takes what Dario Argento likes to call the “non-Cartesian” qualities of Italian horror to the next dank, stone-buttressed level.”

“The story may be a kind of postmodern dream-jumble of countless Gothic narratives, but its visuals are stunning, as chiaroscuro as Steele’s coal-black hair and snow-white skin.” Shorter, yes. But better? Any good at all? “Visuals” are always “stunning,” aren’t they?

Another line from Barbara gets rejigged: “…and faces that are like spells they look so informed,” becomes “and faces like spells.” Minor, but completely unethical unless you add the dreaded […] to make it clear you’re monkeying with a direct quote.

“And yet we’ll never know quite how seriously the filmmakers approached these farragoes. They fuse the kind of outrageous plot twists pioneered by Psycho and Les Diaboliques with all the gothic trappings familiar from The Monk or The Castle of Otranto, and Poe’s morbid, overheated imagination with the new sexual liberality of sixties cinema, already curdled into something icky and sadistic and necrophile, as if decades closeted by the censor had fermented some kind of fetid corruption infecting every glance. The dialogue is always unspeakable in any language (hence, perhaps, all that dubbing, as a kind of disinfectant/alibi), while the plots collapse with the impact of a single breath of air, and characterization is strictly puerile. But the potent sex-death brew is nevertheless intoxicating, the visuals sleek and seductive, and the eyes follow you about the room.”

This gets rendered down into:

“Freda and his contemporaries fused the kind of outrageous plot twists pioneered by Psycho and Les Diaboliques with all the gothic trappings familiar from The Monk or The Castle of Otranto, and Poe’s morbid, overheated imagination with the new sexual liberality of sixties cinema, already curdled into something icky and sadistic and necrophilic, as if decades closeted by the censor had fermented some kind of fetid corruption infecting every glance. […] The potent sex-death brew is nevertheless intoxicating, the visuals sleek and seductive […].”

““Oh, Riccardo Freda! We had our own private opera going,” Steele recalls.” This becomes “Riccardo Freda and I had our own private opera going,” which is, on the one hand, less exciting and expressive, and on the other, not what Barbara Steele actually said, ever.

“A desperate thing to do – like fighting a war – so everyone became emotionally invested on-set, and the atmosphere translated quite powerfully; yes, I’d say the results of all that apparent chaos wound up registering in the movie.” This gets chopped down to a couple of phrases, which is permissible in principal, but why would you want to lose all that good stuff, coming straight from the star’s mouth?

“The villain’s demise is superbly absurd, as he’s sealed within a cartoonish effigy, which makes him look like the lost, Goth member of the Banana Splits (original line-up: Drooper, Fleagle, Snorky, Bingo and Scabies).” By now I’m sure you can guess what got cut here.

“Despite a Scooby Doo/psychological ending eschewing the supernatural, this is one of the most extreme, delirious Italian Gothics, and despite a plot that doesn’t ultimately make a lick of sense, it comes closer to being a proper film than any of them – Francesco de Masi’s beautiful score lifts it out of pulp territory altogether at times.” I think that’s fair comment, though admittedly I should have fixed those two “despites,” bundling the provisos together. That’s just the sort of mistake a good editor can help with. But the final version is weirdly weak: “…this is one of the most extreme, delirious Italian Gothics and Francesco de Masi’s beautiful score lifts it out of pulp territory at times.” Without the “altogether” at the end, that’s a very watery statement to end a paragraph on.

“As soon as we meet the gardener, a hulking near-mute, we anticipate greenhouse shenanigans, given Babs’ history in these things,” — Fangoria drops the “Babs” but replaces it with a blurry “her” despite the fact that Steele’s name hasn’t appeared since the start of the previous sentence. This is exactly the kind of thing — noun/pronoun alternation — that an editor should be able to carry off invisibly.

“Laughter disrupts the dream-flow the picture aims at, but without completely staunching it, so the time passes in hypnagogic free-fall, that too-tired-to-sleep delirium when little jolts keep sparking you into reality, only to slump back to somnolence as the movie drains life and reason from you.” This is cut completely.

“Plywood characters totter through Bava’s puppet theater, crossing from day to night in a single cut, wielding candelabras that cast impossible shadows (how can a light source cast its own shadow?), spouting wooden dialogue from their wooden lips, with only the invading force of Satanism offering any recognizable human vivacity. Steele’s witch is not only fully justified in her revenge, as established in scene one, she’s the only figure with meat on her bones (and we see how it gets there, in a gruesome “re-incarnation” which renders the word literally): getting back into the skin. Exacting her pound of flesh.” Gone: anything that addresses the “flaws” in Bava’s filmmaking is unacceptable, I suspect.

“Fangoria’s grease pencil doodles on the margins, which somehow made its way into the final draft, failed to deliver either clarity or brevity to the final product. Instead, we get a somewhat clunking, rhythmless hot mess mimeograph of the original. This version has visible Cheetoh stains over the once legible prose, as if some suburban dungeon master was tasked with the editing job after replying to a “Make money at home” banner ad on Craig’s List. Stare at them long enough, and you’ll start to sprout visible shoulder blade and knuckle hairs.”

One thing about Il Cinema Ritrovato — unlike a lot of good experiences, it isn’t over quickly. Once you hit the wall (which happened to me before I was really halfway through), time slurs to a near-halt like Wendell Corey on a steep slope, accelerating or dissolving away during screenings and conversations — the minutes flit, but the days stretch on, impersonators of infinity. It’s nice!

I had now adopted a policy of seeing things loud enough to keep me awake — other anti-sleep qualities were strong narratives, speed, and familiar faces. This made the early Japanese talkies and the Polish widescreens a bad risk, but I still hoped to catch some (I failed with the ‘scopes).

Chaplin’s WORK was supposed to begin the day at 9, but I was too sleepy. I think the first thing I made it to was THE HORRIBLE DR HICHCOCK at 10.45. In the intro it was explained that despite valiant efforts by restorers, legal wrangles prevented the movie from being repaired, so the print we saw was somewhat pinked, badly spliced, and missing at least one whole scene. I think it may have been missing more, because although I’ve seen it before I didn’t remember it making QUITE so little sense. But it’s an Italian horror movie so anything’s possible. I wished they’d screened THE GHOST instead.

And then it was lunchtime already — after which (I’m sure it was a good one, but I didn’t take notes) I finally saw one of the Italian compendium episodes that had been getting such raves throughout the fest (Alexander Payne declared one to be the best thing he saw, but nobody could tell me WHICH one). I’d been a touch resistant, since in the compendia I’d seen, only the Fellini episodes tended to be any good. Shows what I know. This one was from Alessandro Blasetti’s TEMPI NOSTRI, the follow-up to his ALTRO TEMPI, which inaugurated the who anthology-film craze in Italy.

It was introduced by Blasetti’s daughter, a voluble nonagenarian, and I realized why these screenings were all overrunning by half an hour. But the background she provided was ESSENTIAL — the episode starred Vittorio De Sica and was SUPPOSED to re-team him with Gina Lollobrigida, with whom he’d formed a popular couple in the previous movie. But Lollobrigida balked at playing a deceived wife, arguing that it was not plausible that a man married to her would ever stray. Blasetti was forced to recast so Elisa Cignani is on jiggling duties instead (literally, she vibrates her body in every scene, sometimes by bouncing one crossed leg, sending tremors through her torso which assume Vesuvian proportions beneath her blouse), but director and co-writer also rewrote the script, I can’t think why. We can see that Cignani was supposed to be De Sica’s wife, but now she’s his parents’ ward, raised as his sister, and the narrative turns not on her jealousy and his infidelity but on her silent love for him and his blindness, until he realizes he shouldn’t think of her as a sister anymore… It doesn’t quite work, but what’s left is the comedy of De Sica as an ebullient Neopolitan bus driver, with a sour-faced supervisor who wants to sack him. It’s just like On the Buses, in other words, if that 70s sitcom were charming and sexy instead of ugly and repulsive.

My vim somewhat restored, I stayed for TOBY DAMMIT, though the print turned out to have subtitles only for the English bits. I’ve seen it often enough that I could follow it. It was better than the old DVD that dubbed it into French — Fellini’s mulit-lingual melange is essential to the hallucinatory experience.

A spirit of randomness kept me in my seat for OIDHCHE SHEANCHAIS, which looks like I just collapsed on my keyboard but is in fact Irish Gaelic for NIGHT OF THE STORYTELLER. Robert Flaherty’s long-lost movie was the first film in that language, and its apparent loss left a puzzling hole in the tragic record. To everyone’s amazement, a print has turned up in America (it was assumed the film, of only local interest, was never exported) and can now be seen. It’s terrible, but at least it can be seen. A kind of footnote to MAN OF ARAN, it has clear historical interest, but nothing else. My objection is that Flaherty films the whole twenty-minute piece with five locked-off set-ups. Wide shot, storyteller, listener, listener, listener. Utterly inexpressive. Somewhat typical of the approach to early talkers seen elsewhere at the fest (Japan, Wellman) but applied here with a rigorous lack of creativity. Then there’s the storyteller himself: some said they could have closed their eyes and enjoyed the music of his voice without the need for translation (and certainly without the need for pictures) — I found his a snore. Admittedly, I was now permanently sleepy from insomnia and the heat.

Then there were three shorts with Peter Sellers, two of them freshly discovered and the third part of the set. That one ran first. It had a couple of laughs — Sellers attempts to cure his cold by wearing a sock full of mustard round his neck, which ruptures in a disgusting welter — b&w film so it’s like a magma flow of porridge slow-oozing into Sellers’ VERY HAIRY CHEST. Disgusting but sort of funny. But the film wasn’t good, and I only stayed for a few minutes of the first redisocvery, DEARTH OF A SALESMAN (mis-spelled in the program, presumably leading some to expect a proper Arthur Miller piece). When the shorts’ rescue hit the news, I discussed them with Richard Lester, who said “I hope they show more artistic ambition than THE CASE OF THE MUKKINESE BATTLEHORN.” They show less. Though not quite at Flaherty’s level of soporific inertia, what I saw of DEARTH was enjoyable only for the hilariously mismatched angles, with Sellers’ position transmuting instantly between every shot.

Then there were some Soviet films about Hitler, (“Good evening, Hitler fans”) screened in the Il Cinema in guerra contro Hitler season. Some nice zany shorts — Hitler, for some reason, was always a comedy figure to the Russians — maybe if you’re working for Stalin, you just can’t help laugh at Hitler. The main feature was THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SCHWEIK, a follow-up to the popular WWI comedy, with Schweik (a really irksome clown, kind of a Soviet El Brendel) getting drafted by the Nazis but defecting to aid the partisans in Yugoslavia. Weirdly, the ending, in which Hitler is captured and exhibited in a cage, and somehow mutates into werewolf form (as inexplicable as Cleopatra the Chicken Lady — “Maybe it as the storm?”), directly echoes a passage in the previous evening’s Hitler entertainment, Pabst’s DER LETZTE AKTE, where Adolf has an infernal monologue about how he’ll never surrender because the allies would show him off as a caged freak…

More synchronicity — Olaf Möller and Christoph Huber had just explained to me their theory about the donkey — that ever-golden cinematic axiom which adds lustre to every opus — and SCHWEIK was well supplied with asinine entertainment, including an animatronic donkey hind legs– an ass’s ass — which kicks various characters. This had Olaf swooning with the possibilities. Has the apparatus been preserved in some Russian film museum, fur flaking off to expose the cybernetic fetlocks beneath? If so, Olaf will gladly drop a kopeck in its slot to make it buck again.

Exhaustion was setting in — I had a good dinner, and didn’t feel able to face another movie, but LADY FROM SHANGHAI was showing in the Piazza Maggiore and it was on my way home, so I thought I’d just look in and see how it was looking. It’s not a reconstruction — no missing footage was found — but it is a very attractive digital presentation — and as it turned out, it was just about to start (everything starts late in Bologna) as I appeared. So I sat on the curb, all seats being occupied, and surrendered to the inevitable…

Jul 2nd — Mercoledi as they call it in Italy. And I ran out of stamina in Bologna, temporarily.

The day began well with FANTOMAS. I wasn’t completely sure of my ability to take the two-and-a-half hour SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT at 9am, so I opted for Feuillade’s serial, tempted by Ehsan Khoshbakht’s praise for the restoration. And indeed, so clean was the picture that it looked like a modern pastiche. When Rene Navarre looked into the camera he seemed to be RIGHT THERE with you.

In Edinburgh I had met Christoph Huber, curator of the Domenik Graf retrospective. Here he was again, in company with fellow donkey enthusiast Olaf Moller. Christoph wore a golden donkey T-shirt. Olaf, more discrete, had on a donkey pendant. And both made the revolutionary claim that Donkeys Make Everything Better. The donkey is an axiom of cinema.

So both were in ecstasy at the screening of scenes from the Ottoman empire — Turkish travelogues from the teens. Many exciting shots of donkeys, including a donkey photobombing a shot of camels at a trough. The ships of the desert are slurping away, and things are looking picturesque, and then the donkey sweeps majestically into frame in closeup profile, like Charles Bronson in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, and wipes them off the screen.

But for true Donkey Heaven we would have to wait a day…

After lunch I made, i think, a mistake, dropping in on a Heinosuke double-bill — these early Japanese talkies tend to foreground sound and the voice in quite literal ways — the one I eventually stayed awake for was all about music, and featured a blind character for whom sound was particularly significant. These two, THE BRIDE TALKS IN HER SLEEP and THE GROOM TALKS IN HIS SLEEP were mild screwball comedies in which the voice plays a key role. Anyhow, I lapsed into unconsciousness for the first one and bailed on the second, which was apparently the better of the two. Makes me wish I’d discovered the Italian compendium films sooner, or opted for THE EPIC OF EVEREST, which cause quite a bit of excitement, or MIDNIGHT MARY, which is a SUPERB Wellman. When sleep threatens, you need a certain kind of movie.

I should have gone to see GIANT at this point, but opted for Barbara Steele’s video appearance, which I thought might be live and interactive but proved to be a pre-record. Beautiful Babs was speaking with regard to the Riccardo Freda season and was very entertaining and there is no danger of falling asleep when SHE is on the screen.

I followed this with DER LETZTE AKTE, (THE LAST ACT, 1955), which deals with Hitler’s last days and is maybe the first big film to do so. It’s directed by GW Pabst and, as Olaf Muller said in his intro, comes from the post-war period when Pabst’s international reputation was and is very low, partly due to some inferior films but mostly because he had failed to get out of Germany during the Nazi era. Not that he ever made anything with pro-Nazi sentiments. The print was pure grindhouse — as Olaf put it (I paraphrase), “After seeing a lot of digital restorations that have all the charm of a hastily-done boob job, we are about to see source material that corresponds more to sagging skin and clumps of grey hair — to my body, in fact.”

The movie was indeed in ratty condition, but that somehow fit the low-ceilinged, oppressive claustrophobia of it. After two hours in the sweaty Sala Scorsese with intermittent, flirtacious air-conditioning, an exhausted simultaneous translator struggling in our earpieces, we all felt like we’d spent ten days in a bunker.

Albin Skoda played Hitler, and Oskar Werner played an obligatory Good German, perhaps not so much a sop to bruised national sensibilities as a sop to commercial cinema, which always feels more comfortable with a sympathetic character around. I was also dubious about whether Hitler really flooded the Berlin Underground to prevent the Russians reaching him by tube, but according to Wikipedia he may have done just that — the movie definitely inflates the resulting tragedy for dramatic purposes, though. I guess the idea of Hitler deliberately massacring the wounded who were sheltering below ground works as a metaphor for what he did to Germany.

A leisurely dinner and then — carbon lamp projection! Germaine Dulac’s LA PRINCESSE MANDAINE is an elegant slice of exotic comedy, with a very funny camp central performance by either Edmond or Ernest Van Duren (IMDb and the Ritrovato catalogue disagree). It’s got a very slender plot and might not have sustained interest, but the added drama of an ancient projector belching poisonous fumes into the air, illuminated by blasting beams of light, and the resulting smooth, chocolatey picture shimmering on the screen, made up for quite a few deficiencies.

Dulac could be quite cheeky — at the end of his Michael Strogoff-inspired dream, the hero rescues the princess only for her to run off with her maid. “I’ve sold myself down the river for a couple of dykes,” complained Bob Hoskins in MONA LISA, and we were supposed to agree (and not wonder what happened to the girls afterwards). Actually, MONA LISA has one of the worst endings of any otherwise quite-good British film of the eighties. Whereas even my most soporific day in Bologna was a treat.